Ask HN: How do you use Notion?

I have some pages and I type stuff in the pages. Later I sometimes read the things that I've typed. The pages contain lists, text, links and kanban boards. That's about it, I don't need anything more complicated. I've also never used other people's templates.

-- having consulted to many startups who use either Notion or Google Drive - I strongly feel that business who run on a well organized google drive are considerably more productive than those who are running in notion - Two general reasons I see - Notion itself isn't particularly snappy for everyone - especially team members on weaker internet connections - plus - it encourages strange rabbit holes of information in hacked together structures - hard to put my finger on that last one, but having been in multiple companies notions - they seem generally more difficult to navigate / find useful information quickly in --

I always find myself coming back to it, both for work and personal life. I'm doing the whole "build in public" thing for my SaaS and use the public notion page to warehouse all of our updates and information.

I've found https://getoutline.com to be a pretty solid contender, although with slightly less functionality.

I have never used it for business cases, but I am in notion for at least an hour a day for personal uses. I use it for a daily planner, personal wiki, and ticker(getting things done) I am naturally unorganized, so I overcompensate. I don't think much of what I do is outside of Notion's primary use case, but maybe it is???

Daily planner

- Every morning I do gratitude, "single most important task", and quick retro on the previous day.

- Schedule out my day giving every 15-minute block of time a goal. While being burnt out I would beat myself up for "not knowing what I am doing with my life". Having a schedule allows me to say "I should be doing x, I don't have to, but that is what I planned to do with this time" it calms some of that negative self-talk.

- Space for me to document random thoughts so they don't use active memory/thought process

Personal Wiki

- I have struggled with too many tabs open, or too many bookmarks in the past. To keep that at bay I have been trying this personal wiki approach for about a year.

- I have a few top-level pages for major categories of my life like bikes, household maintenance, fitness, computers, and programming. then I populate it with different types of content like pages, notes, and databases. These are things like car maintenance schedules, checklists for cleaning, and links/formulas I need to pay quarterly taxes.

Ticker file

- Single database with a few attributes. One attribute is the "review date" that I filter by.

- I chuck random things into this so I can pull them out of my active memory and come back to them later.

Initially used it for weekly reviews and for gathering notes. Then went into the rabbit hole of using the templates created by others.

Gave it up and use multiple apps now. Main ones being Dendron, Complice and workflowy.